


the unadapted puzzle of your heart

by watfordbird33



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Trans Agatha, Trans Female Character, Transitioning, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-29 16:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12088851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watfordbird33/pseuds/watfordbird33
Summary: Your mother is beautiful. She’s beautiful in the way you’d like to be; in the way you imagine yourself to be, staring at your mushed-up face in the reflection in the living room.Do you understand? she repeats, what’s wrong with you?She says it very loud. Like maybe you didn’t hear her the time before, and the time before that, and the time before the time before that.YOU ARE NOT A GIRL.





	the unadapted puzzle of your heart

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for strong descriptions of gender dysphoria, transphobic parents, some language. If you're not up for trans Agatha, then don't read this! You know your limits; you know who you are.
> 
> I'm seriously excited about this one :)

You’re very young when you first realize something’s wrong, because you ask your mother for the right kind of swimsuit, and she looks ashamed. She scolds you in this tight voice, this angry whisper, a kind of fierceness present that you’ve never heard before.

And so you have no choice but to wear your swimsuit and put your hands on your chest, sometimes, when she’s not looking, so you can cover up just like the other girls do, and not be all alone.

The first day of kindergarten your teacher refers to your class as boys and girls, and when she says  _ girls  _ she looks right at you, so that you do a little happy squirmy sort of dance in your chair because  _ she  _ at least gets it;  _ she _ can see right through the shell someone built over your heart. But then at recess you use the bathroom and she scolds you in the same thin razor tone your mother used,  _ not the right one, use the right one,  _ it’s always wrong and right.

You get a diary that fall. It’s blue, which is not your favorite color, or even close (though everyone assumes it is). You write all about the shell that covers up your heart. Your mother talks about God a lot, so you assume He must have done it. Probably waved His hands a lot until the Fake You sprang up and sewed itself around your insides, and the girl within.

One day your mother finds your diary and after she’s puzzled through the backwards S’s and the upside-down J’s, she screams at you. You have never heard your mother scream. You have never seen, either, such a complete disregard for the environment as she shows you now. She throws your whole diary in the trash.

Do you understand? she says. 

Your mother is beautiful. She’s beautiful in the way you’d like to be; in the way you imagine yourself to be, staring at your mushed-up face in the reflection in the living room. 

Do you understand? she repeats, what’s  _ wrong  _ with you?

She says it very loud. Like maybe you didn’t hear her the time before, and the time before that, and the time before the time before that.

YOU ARE NOT A GIRL.

Here are words that brand themselves across the shell your heart hides in, that sear into your skin, that perforate your understanding of the world.

Because before you only knew: you’re not a boy. You know this even now, deeper than you’ve known anything ever before, though you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the funny little protrudence come out between your legs. This is a boy thing, your father told you once, and you can’t play with it in public. You can’t talk about it to anyone but me.

That surprised you. Why would you want to  _ ever  _ talk about it? It seems more like something to be ashamed of, to want to put away.

Girls have vaginas. You learned this in a book your mother gave you. You don’t seem to have one of those. Once you try putting your head between your legs, to check, but you can’t get down that far. They look more pleasant than what  _ you  _ have, and so you figure it must have just been a mistake, on God’s part. So you pray every night: fold your hands together, bow your head, and ask for a vagina. You feel for it in the morning, but it never comes.

 

When you turn seven, you stop believing in God. That’s the year a kid at school calls you a word you’ve never heard before. You ask your mother what it means, and she turns white.

The spring of second grade, you realize that there will never be anyone else who sees you, never anyone else who unwraps your shell and puzzles out the contours of your heart. It’s a very sad realization, but you bear it pretty well, you think. You stop checking for a vagina every night. You’ve learned  _ vagina  _ is also a word that will make your mother turn white, and even  _ penis  _ doesn’t go over so well. Instead you wear your khakis and your little pressed polo shirts, and you play soccer with the boys. You are horrendously bad at soccer. You want to do something else. 

By third grade, your mother has started laughing at the phase you went through, lamenting the innocent kid who thought he could be a girl. (You don’t like when she says your name. You don’t like when she says that you’re a he. But you keep quiet. You swallow the stuff inside.) Her friends laugh, too. They tell stories of their silly kids. Their boys who are boys and their girls who are girls. They have no words for you and you don’t ask, because how could you? Who would listen; who would know the answer and the truth? You start to think of yourself as the word that kid called you. There’s not much else to choose from, except  _ girl,  _ and nobody approves of  _ that. _

In fourth grade, you make a friend. She is very small and sports an enormous cloud of red-blond hair. Your mother says she’s a fool. Her name is Minty, which you think is the loveliest name you’ve ever heard.

Once, you ask her to paint her nails. She looks shocked, and you hasten to tell her it’s a secret, it’s a joke. Just don’t tell my mom. (That’s what kids call their mothers, now,  _ Mom,  _ easy label just like boy and girl.) Minty relents only after you say then you’ll teach her soccer, though you’re very bad.

Your nails get painted blue. You wipe them off before your mother sees, and Minty helps you, and even says a curse word when the paint just won’t come off. You kind of gape at her and she just smiles. Minty has what your father calls Hidden Depths.

In fifth grade, she tells you she has a crush on a boy named Thomas. He’s tall and he spikes his black hair up so tall sometimes you think it’ll fall over. He plays on your soccer team (which your mother won’t let you quit). Minty asks you if you’ll  _ put in a good word for her,  _ and then maybe after they’re dating she’ll find  _ you  _ a girlfriend, and you two can double-date.

Funnily enough, it’s not the word  _ girlfriend  _ you object to.

You don’t know why. You have almost given up on trying to puzzle out the intricacies of your existence, the backwardness of everything in you. You get a phone for Christmas, and keep a locked document where you write your questions. There aren’t any answers. There never have been.

 

In March, you steal nail polish from a cheap department store. It’s purple, and you paint it on upstairs, with your door locked, and the fan on so your mother won’t smell it. When it’s done drying you go to the mirror and look at yourself and you are not a girl. YOU ARE NOT A GIRL. You put your head against the glass and you can’t breathe, for so long that it scares you, and you almost yell.

The nail polish comes off easily. You sit on the floor of your bathroom and look at your toes, your feet, your ankles, the hair on your legs. A girl in your science class talks about shaving her legs. She says it very loudly, so you can’t help but overhear.

Your mother has a razor. Soap. 

Here is what you want: less hair, more curves. A better smile. A rounder face.

Here is your favorite color: pink. It has been since you were very small, and you saw it on your mother’s shoe. A pink flower and pointy heel. Your parents laughed, then. They found it cute how their son would play with daughters’ toys, would ask to be a girl, would pull his penis like he didn’t know quite what to do with it, or even what it was.

You lean yourself back very slowly and put your head on the edge of the tub. The ceiling is white and infinite and you put shapes in it: razors and tiny hearts. You expand them out and make them into question marks, and then they all fall down.

 

By sixth grade, you have become exceedingly good at wearing the sorts of clothes which endear you to your peers. You master the little head-nod of the guys. 

By seventh grade, you convince yourself that your name looks okay, written down, and maybe if you choke down all the feelings inside you can forget the true nature of your heart, and start anew. It is the sort of convincing that hurts you deep enough so you pretend that you don’t care. And it’s easier, sometimes. Your mother smiles more. Your father claps you on the back and says  _ good man.  _

You see a future: Ralph Lauren polos and your mother’s smile. 

At the eighth grade dance, Minty kisses you for the first and final time. By now she is just about level with the top of your chest, still raw with awkward fledgling bone. She kisses you out of nowhere, suddenly, standing on her tiptoes, grasping at the back of your neck. You kiss her back. It’s sloppy and you’re not sure where your tongue is supposed to be. Her mouth is touching all along the line where a short track of hair is growing, thin and blond.

The kiss is nice but you can’t help thinking that she’s in it for all the wrong reasons. That she’s pressed against you because she  _ likes _ the ridge of bone in your flat chest, the down of hair above your upper lip. That your little head-nod and your practiced smile has turned her upside down.

And she wouldn’t have done it, if she knew.

Later, suit discarded on the mattress, you lock yourself in the bathroom. You shake all over, handfuls of shower curtain clenched in your fists, because you didn’t bury it far enough. You didn’t close it away.

YOU ARE NOT A GIRL.

The trouble is that you don’t believe this and you never have.

 

You ask for boarding school, the spring before ninth grade, and your parents oblige. They send you to their alma mater. It’s called Watford, and it’s excessively grand. 

In the middle of the starched uniforms and the scones for breakfast and the gate with the ornate and gilded curl, you live day-to-day, unencumbered. Your body still feels like that shell, that covering you disparaged from such a painfully young age, but it’s easier when your parents aren’t around. When Minty--flighty, lovely fool that she is--is gone, too. When you can wear a rashguard with your trunks into the swimming pool, and no one really cares.

You start breathing again. You hadn’t realized you’d stopped.

 

In October, you meet Simon. He’s the sort of boy you wish you could be, to please your parents, to ease yourself: so sure of himself. So free. Sometimes you think you love him (his laughing blue eyes, his golden curls). Then you choke this down. You don’t need another question unanswered on your list.

For the longest time, you think he hates another boy in your political science class, and so you hate, too, by extension. Friends have got each other’s backs, and all that. The boy’s name is Baz, and he makes you the most nervous out of anyone you’ve ever met. You think, the first time you meet him, that he’s a vampire. Somehow this must get around to him, because he always bares his teeth at you, and laughs.

In December, you learn they’re in love--Simon and Baz.  _ In love.  _ At first when someone says it you nearly laugh. Impossible on so many levels. Wrong in so many ways. Then you drop behind them in the halls and watch them: Baz’s sneer. Simon’s grin. The bump of elbows, the way they walk. Just slightly bent towards each other. No space for a third.

You think you’d like to have someone like they do. 

(It only occurs to you much later that you didn’t for a second question them based on their gender. That you didn’t deem them incompatible because of boy and boy.)

 

Your roommate is so masculine it hurts. He strips in front of you. He jerks off, sometimes, at night. You put your head in the pillow and pretend you’re gone, you’re elsewhere, you’re sitting with Simon, you’re watching him kiss Baz. You’re in a dress and your chest swells. Your legs are smooth.

Too many loose edges, like threads you should just snip. You wish you could.

There’s a new student, in May. You see her on the lawn between classes, in the cafeteria talking to Simon and Baz. She has this hair. Improbably, wonderfully red, and so bushy you wonder if things get lost in it. Cat-eye glasses and a giant chunky ring.

Her name is Penelope. Penny. 

She comes up to you in poli sci, Simon and Baz at her back, and starts talking, a mile a minute. Beautiful, is what you think. You listen to all of it; you hear just about none. You’re watching her hair and her eyes behind her glasses and the double curve of her chest, heaving with emotion. 

You are not a girl. (You are not her)

You are not a boy.  (And you are not yourself)

After your shower, that night, you stand in your bathroom naked and stare at yourself. Simon called you handsome, once, and Baz smacked him, and they kissed a little, like an apology. You think he might be right, though. You might be handsome. Right now you gleam with water droplets, tall and lean. You put your hand on the glass, so you can’t see the stuff between your legs. Then you use your other hand to pull your hair around your face like a curtain, so it looks longer than it is.

And reality hits you, sharp-edged, disasterous: even if you were to change, to tell people about the way your heart appears to you--who would you be? A freak of some sort, neither boy nor girl, hairy and curvy equally in all the wrong places. A goddamn fucking freak.

You put your clothes on, slow. 

 

By junior year, Penny is your closest friend.

She doesn’t treat you like a guy. You think maybe this is what you like about her. She tells you girl things and lets you help her with her studies--what little you can; she’s painfully smart--and sometimes cries on your shoulder. You let her. You close your eyes so she won’t hear the pounding of your heart beneath her head.

Perhaps now, you always think. She wouldn’t judge.

But then someone’s done graffiti on the walls outside, that word that stilled your mother, that word that broke your trust in God. And maybe she would judge. Maybe she would laugh. Maybe she would wonder what was under your clothes.

Does it matter, what’s under your clothes?

In January, Simon and Baz have sex, and Simon tells Penny and Penny tells you. You wish you didn’t know. It makes you see them differently; it makes you want Penny even more. Her outlandish hair and glasses and the way she talks. Her strong thighs. Her smile. The stuff she tells you late at night. 

Your mother writes and tells you Minty misses you. Privately, you doubt.

 

One day it’s too much, and you implode.

I’m a girl, you tell Penny, I’m a girl, and you can hate me, you can kill me, but I’m not a guy.

It is the first time you’ve ever said such a thing aloud.

 

She seems legitimately shocked that you would think she’d doubt you, hate you. Her eyes are wide and maybe full of tears. You hope. You hope not. Your whole body’s on fire and you want to run away.

I love you, she says (but it’s not the right kind, because nothing goes right). I love you, you know that? And you can be whoever the fuck you want to be, and I will love you always just the same.

She helps you look stuff up. She puts an arm around your shoulders and holds you very close.

And here is the truth: you’re transgender. You’re a woman, you’re a girl.

(You’re a girl.)

Goddamn the world. You were right and they were wrong and this--this is truth.

YOU’RE A GIRL.

 

Simon and Baz make you a little rainbow pin, and take you shopping for women’s clothes. Watford seems indifferent. You suppose this is the best thing that could happen, really. 

On your papers, you stop writing your old name and write instead,  _ Agatha.  _ Agatha Wellbelove. Simon calls you  _ Aggie,  _ and Baz just calls you  _ Wellbelove. _ It’s a searingly beautiful name. And it’s yours. It’s yours.

You grow your hair out long; pierce your ears with Penny’s help; attend feminist meetings in the library. Your mother writes of Minty, and you nearly laugh. In your next letter, you enclose a picture of yourself, rainbow pin and grown-out hair and all. There’s no response, but two weeks later, she and your father show up in the school office. When they see you, they start to scream.

You wait them out and then you say your piece and the three of you go back and forth, scream and shout, talk and reason, end it, end it, end it, you goddamn can’t take any more.

God will shame you, your mother says, and you say, Let him; you say, God never helped me; I did this all myself. 

Your father cries.

You tell him, gentler, that you have known this all along.

That summer you go home with Penny. Her home is crowded, scents and siblings and piles and piles of books. The two of you make cookie people and paint the ones with dresses blue. Her mother asks you friendly questions and treats you like you’re cis, like you have always been a girl.

You have always been a girl, you realize. So many of your realizations have felt like swallowing sand, but this one feels like hope. 

In the middle of cookie-decorating, when her family has retreated upstairs. Penny leans over and kisses you squarely on the mouth. Her lips are warm and she tastes of cookie, and her hands on your shoulders are soft.

You ask her why she’d do such a thing, and she says, Because you’re beautiful, Ags. You’re the fucking most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen.

You kiss her first, this time. And she dissolves your shell.


End file.
